The Story of Christianity, Vol. 2: The Reformation to the Present Day

 

The Story of Christianity, Vol. 2: The Reformation to the Present Day – by Justo Gonzalez

This book is not only excellent in terms of content, but also in its structure.  Telling such a mammoth history in only 500 pages is not an easy task.  Even though author Gonzalez does divide his history over two volumes, one walks away wishing that this was a 10 or a 20 volume set as opposed to only 2.  There’s simply too much, but it’s all captivating reading.  I read volume 1 about three years ago, and I wisely re-read  it before tackling this one.  This was a smart move as it refreshed my brain of many of the details.  So, yes, I recommend reading these two volumes back to back.

Volume 1 was slightly easier to follow since during the time period, there was only one Christian church.  The Protestant Reformation changed all of that, and volume 2 picks up as the reformation gathers steam.  So with so many more Christian religions in so many more corners of the globe, the author has to keep several juggling balls up in the air to tell an engaging story.

What this means is that this book is not linear. It simply can’t be.  There’s too many movements, too many countries, too many world events that are all happening at once.  When the author is detailing a particular movement, quite often the movement lasts well over 100 years and is specific to only one or two geographical areas of the world.  So when he introduces the NEXT main movement of the Christian church, often times we have to go to another part of the world and set the clock back a century or so.  This can get confusing.  Like all history books, this book almost needs to be studied in addition to simply being read.  I’ve made a mental note that the next time I read these two volumes (and there WILL be a next time), I’ll go much slower and take detailed notes.   There’s too many emperors, popes, kings and countries to keep track.  It doesn’t help when there are so many roman numerals after names such as Innocent, Leo, Benedict, Louis, and Pius.  So we’ll read about Leo VII on one page, and on the very next page we move forward 50 years ago and are now reading about Leo IX or Leo X.  Then, two or three CHAPTERS later, we go back to Leo VII or Leo VIII for proper context.  (This is a hypothetical example.  I have no idea nor recollection of all of the actual “Leos”.) The author does include “charts” that are somewhat helpful, but I read the e-versions of these books, and such charts are too hard to navigate to and fro.

Please note I’m not complaining.  Author Gonzalez does a splendid job keeping his narrative as straight as possible with all of the time travel and geographical switching; it’s just that such things can never assimilate in one’s brain unless a journal for note taking is handy.  He does do a wonderful job reminding his readers of this fact as he states things such as “We’ll revisit this fact in more detail in an upcoming chapter”,  or “…as we learned about in detail in Chapter xx…”.

I also enjoyed the fact that the author is neutral towards his subject.  A Christian himself, Gonzalez doesn’t whitewash the history of the faith.  When we read about the ‘leaders’ of the Protestant Reformation such as Luther, Hus, and Wycliffe, he doesn’t brand them as misfits for questioning the mother church.  Instead, he clearly communicates their motives and we see how practices such as simony and indulgences were badly abused, and these men simply couldn’t abide such a perversion of the faith.  Of course, when Protestantism becomes mainstream, what we witness over several hundred years is a far cry from unity and brotherly love amongst the different denominations.  Still, though, the overall theme of the book is one of hope.  He concludes by stating that whereas Christianity has been in a slow decline in spots such as Europe and North America over the past century, the world is seeing a massive uptick of the faithful in places such as Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

I highly recommend this wonderful book along with its predecessor.  I’m really serious, though, when I suggest that you should read this thing slowly; maybe one or two chapters a week along with a notebook.  This really is a fascinating story.

Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance

 

Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance by Michael R. Beschloss

I came across a book by this same author with a similar context on the relationship between John F. Kennedy (not the ‘Kennedy’ of this book) and Nikita Khrushchev. That book was one of the best historical books I have ever read.  Whenever I come across a book that moves me such as that one did, I feel the urge to read more of the author’s work.  Because I’m somewhat obsessive-compulsive, I like to start at the beginning and read the author’s output chronologically.  This particular book is the author’s first effort.

What I found incredibly interesting is that this book was released in 1980 when the author was 25. This means that he probably started writing the thing when he was 22 or 23.   When **I** was 22 years old, I wasn’t even shaving every day yet.   I mention this because it’s too easy to dismiss this book and come away feeling disappointed after reading later works by the author, but this criticism is unfair.  We shouldn’t expect someone so young to come up with a Pulitzer Prize effort on their first effort.  So although this book was very well written, it simply didn’t captivate me as much as the aforementioned work.

This book deals with the ongoing arduous relationship between Joseph Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt. These two men were undoubtedly two of the biggest movers and shakers of the first half of the twentieth century. They both accomplished great things, yet this book shows us that much of what these men did in their careers was more self-centered than it was philanthropic.  These were two men obsessively driven by their egos to get as far up the mountain as they could possibly go. In order to accomplish said goals, these two men badly needed each other.  They didn’t like each other, but they needed each other.   What’s painfully obvious is that whenever we read about these two men and their frequent interactions, it’s VERY obvious that there’s a mutual distaste of the two, yet we see them cautiously dance around their words and actions so they don’t push or offend the other guy too much.  It’s rather uncomfortable, yet I suppose this is somewhat the norm when one harbors such dangerous goals and desires.

This book doesn’t serve as a biography of either man, yet we do get a brief history of their early histories and their rise to notoriety.  Since Roosevelt actually becomes President (with a lot of help from Kennedy), we see that he always has a slight upper hand in the ongoing bickering-filled relationship.  Kennedy is always jockeying for high placement within the Roosevelt administration, yet never really feels like he is appreciated nor utilized as he should be.  We read about some of his appointments during Roosevelt’s 12-year term such as SEC Chairman and Ambassador to Britain, and it always seems as though Kennedy is desperately trying to free himself from Roosevelt’s leash and implement his own policies and procedures.  This is painfully obvious during Kennedy’s ambassadorship to England in 1939 with a world war brewing.  Kennedy seems to think there’s no way that Germany will fail to prevail, so why not cozy up to Hitler and make life easier for himself and the many wealthy Americans akin to his position?

Although this book (in hardback format) is only about 280 pages, the pages are packed and the print is small.  This is a book where your mind can’t wander for a sentence or two, as you’ll miss critical information.  So I guess you could say it’s good that the author kept the length of the book somewhat manageable, but I can’t help wonder if he shouldn’t have added another 100 pages or so and let the material breath a bit more so it could be a bit more digestible.  He also needed to work on educating his readers a bit more when introducing popular policies that were either initiated or in vogue at the time.  For example:  About ¾ through the book, the author mentions and starts pontificating on the “Lend-Lease Program”, yet doesn’t bother stating what it actually was.  Uninformed readers might need enlightenment, and it would have been nice to have a paragraph or two to the give the person a bit of the basics.  This seems especially obvious in hindsight since readers didn’t have a handy tool such as Wikipedia or the internet at their fingertips.

I then have to ask myself if such a book is really necessary.  I can’t honestly say that I learned anything new within these pages.  True, I’ve read extensive bios of both of these figures, and this book WAS written 40 years ago, so it could be that such revelations that the author puts forth might have been more “book worthy” at the time.  Still, though, this is an incredible accomplishment for an author of such a young age.   I still plan on reading much more by this author, and I highly recommend him.

Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson

Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson by Gordon S. Wood

Although it probably wasn’t the intention of the author, this is really a great book to read during the current period of the United States simply because it illustrates that in the world of politics, nothing has really changed. It’s so tempting to see the ubiquitous bickering of the two political parties inflamed by tools such as social media and think that things have really gotten out of hand. Author Gordon S. Wood shows us that this behavior has been happening since the beginning of our country’s history. Adams and Jefferson were the first two presidential candidates who faced off against each other (George Washington was a unanimous selection as the first president). These two started out quite amiable towards each other, yet over time the differences between the two began to outweigh the similarities. This caused a plethora of insulting name-calling, bruised egos, faltered friendships and a divided country. Yes, even in its infancy, the United States was anything but united.

This book really isn’t a “co” biography. We learn a lot about both of these founding fathers, but the main highlight of this volume is the differences between the two. Sometimes this style of writing works, other times it felt a bit awkward. At least for my tastes. Maybe I was wanting more “biographical” information about the subjects? I’ve read excellent biographies of both of these individuals and felt like I already knew much about what author was telling his readers. That’s not a slam of the book, only an observation. For me, though, the parts of this book that I enjoyed the most were when these differences were told around specific event in history. My favorite part was during John Adams’ tenuous presidency with Jefferson serving as his vice-president (running mates weren’t selected as they are now; they were elected). You could definitely see the differences between the two expounded on and see how their already fragile feelings start to become more fractured. Other times, though, I felt as if I was sitting in a boring philosophy class with a very tepid instructor. We read an awful lot, for example, of the deep feelings and beliefs around topics such as a “constitution” and what it should include and involve. It can be quite drab reading.

Still, though, the pros of this book far outweigh the cons. What is particularly fascinating is that we are reading about a brand-new country. No one knew whether or not this “experiment” would work, and Adams and Jefferson had radically different ideas of success. In their minds, if things weren’t done their way, the whole country would collapse faster than it was assembled. Ironically, we see benefits and pitfalls of both of their philosophies and most clear-thinking people might argue the same is true with the political climate today.

Adams was the hard-core Federalist, who essentially wanted the new nation to mirror the government of Mother England. Yes, order was important, but he wanted to go as far as having hereditary succession. His belief was that all men were definitely NOT created equal and that only a certain level of a mind should be trusted to lead a nation. Jefferson, on the other hand, was of the rebellious Republican breed who thought government should be almost invisible. He DID believe all men were created equal, but by ‘equal’, well….among other things….that didn’t include Black people. So nothing was perfect back then either.

It should also be pointed out that both of these men died on the same day. Ironically, it was July 4, 1826 – the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. So in some strange way, these two individuals are probably more ‘connected’ than maybe they should be. In their latter years after serving in office, they seem to mellow their attitudes significantly towards each other. To be honest though, both of these individuals came across as being rather grumpy and uncompromising; especially towards each other. Still, though, it’s a great part of the history of the United States that needs to be learned. A good read despite the fact that it does get bogged down in places. You may want to start with a straight-up biography of the two men before tackling this one.

Casino

Casino – by Nicolas Pileggi

Like most people, I probably would not have read this book had I not seen the wonderful Martin Scorsese movie of the same name. Sadly, I didn’t enjoy this book nearly as much as the movie. In fact, I didn’t really enjoy this thing at all. I thought it was poorly written and am quite surprised how Scorsese managed to take something like this and turn it into such a beautiful piece of cinematic art. That says a lot of a film director. We must also remember that the movie was “based on” the book. Scorsese takes a lot of liberty with the script and, for whatever reason, he changes all the names of the real people. So Lefty Rosenthal became Ace Rothstein (DeNiro), Tony Spilotro became Nicky Santoro (Pesci), Geri became Ginger (Sharon Stone), etc. etc.

Speaking of character names, this is by far the biggest weakness of this entire book. For whatever reason, author Pileggi feels obligated to name every single minor character in the book. This is not at all necessary when the characters really don’t add anything to the story. This only manages to confuse the reader since one’s brain really shouldn’t have to be forced to assimilate so many names of people throughout the course of the book. Let’s look at an example of what I mean. I would propose the following statement is ideal:

“John drove across town in his car with three of his friends.”

However, the way Pileggi would write that statement would be:

“John drove across town in his car with Bill Thomas who was his next-door neighbor that owned a dry-cleaning business. Also in the car was Mark Dillon who John knew since high school. In the last seat of the car was George Miller who was John’s second cousin from his first marriage.”

Now, assuming we never come across Bill, Mark, or George again in the story, we really don’t need this excess of description stated in the above paragraph. After a while, your brain starts to automatically tune out these superfluous names as soon as you come across them. This is not a good thing because if the character JUST MIGHT be relevant to the remainder of the story, you’ve now trained your conscious to ignore them, so it becomes more burdensome when you read their name again and you can’t quite place them. This was a big, big hindrance for me.

Another problem that I had with this novel is it didn’t really flow into an easy-to-understand story. Pileggi throws so many stories from so many people into his narrative, and many of them don’t really even take place in a casino or even Las Vegas. This book seems more of anecdotal recollection of many of the mob personalities that are closely related to the key players. Again, the movie tended to do this, but when you have a master like Martin Scorsese, he can take all of this jumbled information and still tell a decent story while making sense out of all of muddled stories and episodes that are randomly thrown at us. I never really felt like there was any linear progression here, and when you did see relationships progress (such as the love triangle between Lefty, Tony, and Geri) it’s told in such a haphazard fashion, that a lot of the emotion the reader should feel simply isn’t there.

Other times, the author includes things such as entire transcripts of police reports, entire court transcriptions, and entire news stories verbatim. Probably the highlight (emotion wise) of the book is when Lefty and Geri are having their last fight and she’s screaming at him outside of their house while loaded on drugs. Yet right in the middle of this drama, Pileggi haphazardly includes the arrest report and it seems to throw the drama off too much. I mean, I could understand the author including this arrest report as a postscript at the end of the chapter, but why include it right in the middle of the event as he’s describing it?

I think that the approach that the author should have taken would have been to not include so many verbatim interviews that he conducted with related individuals, and instead try to incorporate the stories into an easy flowing narrative. He should have then maybe included an appendix with this multitude of individuals instead of flooding his readers with this information throughout the story.

I must confess that as I write this review, the vast majority of other reviewers on Amazon have given this book a very high rating. So maybe I’m just missing something. I simply didn’t enjoy the book and thought the overall experience was extremely tedious. Oh well, it did lead to a great movie.